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omega_cubed writes "The New York Times reports that Jim Sanborn, the sculptor who created the wavy metal pane called Kryptos that sits in front of the CIA in Langley, VA, has gotten tired of waiting for code-breakers to decode the last of the four messages. 'I assumed the code would be cracked in a fairly short time,' [Sanborn] said, adding that the intrusions on his life from people who think they have solved his fourth puzzle are more than he expected. So now, after 20 years, Mr. Sanborn is nudging the process along. He has provided The New York Times with the answers to six letters in the sculpture's final passage. The characters that are the 64th through 69th in the final series on the sculpture read NYPVTT. When deciphered, they read BERLIN."

The story of OVALTINE®, or should we say Ovomaltine, begins in 1904. Ovomaltine was originally developed in Switzerland as a recovery drink for skiers returning from a long, active day. (For some reason it was never poured into little kegs and hung on the necks of St. Bernards for roaming the Alps.)

As it grew from a recovery drink into a popular chocolatey beverage, Ovomaltine decided to see the world. When it went through customs, however, a printing error forever changed the name of the chocolatey treat. And the world was introduced to OVALTINE. (Our thanks go out to customs!)

Of course, if this had happened today, it would be called...
OBAMATINE

A similar story is allegedly behind the cosmetics product line which in different countries are named "Oil of Olay" / "Olaz" / "Ulay" / "Ulan".The story is that when first exporting it to Europe, the representative typed in the name on a German QWERTZ keyboard, and Olay became Olaz. After that, the company decided to do the cat thing[*], and gave it a new name for the next couple of countries.

[*]: You know, pretend it skid into the wall intentionally, and is just fine, thank you.

They aren't code crackers. That's the NSA's job. The CIA assassinates people, and uses very expensive satellites to watch weenie-roasts in countries you can't pronounce, which are started with very large heavy metal cans and ended very suddenly with a bang and a cheer. They also made the CIA World Factbook... which in my humble opinion may be the only thing they've done for the internet that was useful.

So lay off on them being given a really complex soduku in their backyard and then being upset because they

The US government used to work hard to keep the NSA out of the public eye. Though the existence of the organization wasn't a total secret, press coverage wasn't welcome at all until after September 11. I remember when I arrived at Defense Language Institute in late 1999 as a fresh Navy recruit, some among my supervisors, old hands in SIGINT and some of whom had served at Ft. Mead itself, were very upset at the recent Baltimore Sun coverage of DLI and the NSA. "The public doesn't need to know any of what we do."

Also, the CIA's spies had to use encryption. Their lives depended on it, and the organization grew out of earlier military units concerned with cryptography and codebreaking.

So when it came to putting up a monument like this, one that would attract the public to figure out its secrets, better to put it outside the CIA's headquarters, because by this point the existence and general purpose of the CIA was known to everyone.

The US government used to work hard to keep the NSA out of the public eye. Though the existence of the organization wasn't a total secret, press coverage wasn't welcome at all until after September 11.

The existence of the organization was not only not a total secret, but no secret at all. Who ever wanted to know would have easily learned about the NSA years before because it was very much visible in things like the skipjack encryption of the clipper chip (1993, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip [wikipedia.org]). It

Does it matter? There are 16 government intelligence agencies. Supposedly the CIA is the only independent agency. NSA and NRO report to the DOD, plus all the other agencies report to various departments (mainly DOD), but there are representatives from DOE, DHS, DOJ, etc...
I'm sure that you can try to pigeonhole various agencies and say that their function is x, but even though all those agencies fall under the same umbrella as part of the US intelligence community, the sharing of information between agenc

The Soviet planners were so impressed with one-time pads that decided that they needed to be copied:

Somebody who was working for the manufacturers of Soviet secret-communication materials had reused pages of some of the "one-time" pads in other "one-time" pads, which were then used for other secret messages. This defeated the purpose of the one-time pad, which provides ideal security when each page is used exactly once and then disposed of.

The article continues:

It is unclear as to why this fatal mistake was made, or by whom.

I would guess that he, who made the mistake, is pushing up the daisies in Siberia now . . .

Poor sculptor actually, since Sanborn chopped off a letter in one of the codes to make it more aesthetically pleasing but as a result led everyone to an incorrect answer [elonka.com] for one of the puzzles

FWIW, my high school German teacher was a teenager in Germany at the time, and her grandmother scolded her severely for busting a gut laughing at Kennedy when he uttered this line. And just to be clear, she comes from an old Prussian family -- this was not a case of an American military family having one over on their president. While folks in Berlin might not have made much of the turn of phrase, folks elsewhere in Germany, at least some of them, had a grand old time.

It's true that "Ich bin ein Berliner" is ambiguous. It can refer to someone who is from the city of Berlin, or who feels he is a jelly filled doghnut. As with all ambiguous sentences, you usually assume the meaning that seems correct given the context. Thus, Kennedy's use of the sentence was completely correct. (It's quite possible that your then-teenage German teacher believed it was funny, kids that are trying to misunderstand someone to creaty funny situations are not exactly unusual)

I think the fun part arose from quick logic.There is, as you said, two types of Berliner, it's either someone from Berlin, or the jam-filled doughnut. Since the Amerikaner obviously wasn't from Berlin, the conclusion must be...

Germans are incredibly tolerant about their language; if you try to speak it they will lend helping hands. I guess they figure that if you have the courage to try to learn it, and speak it, you don't need to prove any valour beyond that. (German is not my first language).

I have seen the film clip where Kennedy says, "Ich bin ein Berliner!", but all of the crowd knew what he wanted to say, and so it was no problem.

Germans are incredibly tolerant about their language; if you try to speak it they will inform you that they actually speak fluent English, and that it would be easiest for the both of you to continue the conversation in your native tounge.

FTFY

I've always wanted to become fluent in German, but decades of compulsory English education at all levels of German secondary school mean that most Germans already speak my language. It's kind of hard to motivate myself to learn their language when I know it would be a mostly academic exercise.:-(

If you walk up to someone and start the conversation in German, it can continue in German. If you need to conduct business and aren't comfortable concluding it in a language you struggle with, you can always switch to English and be successful.

I was able to use quite a bit more German than I thought I would when I visited Austria and Germany for a few weeks in 2008; it had been almost a decade since I had studied German in college.

Actually, "ich bin ein Berliner" is not wrong. The creative re-interpretation of JFK's words rests solely on the fact that "Berliner" is also the name for those jelly-filled doughnuts. If he had given the speech in München (Munich) and had said, "Ich bin ein Münchner", nobody would have thought to make anything more of it.

Exactly. I am German and there is a game we play with little kids called "Teekesselchen". This is a game where the goal is to find the meaning or a word which is pronounced the same but means different things. The opponent needs to figure out the word by me describing the item without using the actual word.One Example is Boxer which can be a human fighter or a dog.

Same goes for Berliner, most Germans with a basic understanding of German/English know that JFK was not talking about a jelly doughnut.

English is my first language, but I am also fluent in German. One time a colleague asked me to translate an email that he had inadvertently been put on CC, in German. The whole department laughing their asses off over the word: Fehlerbehebungsmaßnahmen.

I told them that the meaning for me was crystal clear, but you would need a whole sentence in English to describe what it meant.

I guess they figure that if you have the courage to try to learn it, and speak it, you don't need to prove any valour beyond that.

I suppose it stems from the fact that German is known to be pretty complicated to learn, especially when English is your mother tongue.

I have seen the film clip where Kennedy says, "Ich bin ein Berliner!", but all of the crowd knew what he wanted to say, and so it was no problem.

Actually, JFK had a quite remarkable pronounciation. He could not entirely conceal his American accent, but managed to get his tongue round very well. However, the crowd reacted with such enthusiasm because two years before JFK's speech, the East Germans had started constructing the Berlin Wall isolating West Berlin. And at this climax of the Cold War, an American president

Having spent some time researching this story years ago - here is the bottom line.

What Kennedy said was the only correct way to say what he intended to say - there was literally no error at all in any way.

But German, like all other languages, has ambiguous syntax and constructs - ESPECIALLY - when you mix colloquialisms into formal language. Interpreting Kennedy as saying "I am a jelly doughnut" is not a serious criticism of what he said, it is instead a rather weak and juvenile Germany joke. The joke is ac

It was part of their plan to decode it. They know that social engineering is often a much more effective way of getting at encrypted data than an attack on the algorithm; by pestering the author with a bunch of claptrap, they've already gotten him to reveal part of the plaintext.

Next phase: Stand outside of his apartment with a stereo held overhead Say Anything-style, blasting Achy Breaky Heart. The remainder of the message will fall in days.

And James Jesus Angelton provided the orchids from his private garden. I am still kicking myself for not attending a book signing session by Markus Wolf, that took place near where I live . . . hell, then I could claim, "I saw the face, of the man without a face!"

A real cryptographer would have written something on the side of his notes saying, "Oh, I have found a really simple solution for this cipher, but I don't ha

I was going to do a funny parody of Leonard Cohen's serious parody of our Cold War adversaries (unfortunately, "Berlin" gets you only to the mid-30s character-wise), but the first line of the song and the timing of the NYT article jumped right out at me.

There's no crypto behind this guess. Just a leap of intuition from a reference to Webster to King Tut. And the fact that Cohen's First We Take Manhattan was published in 1988, which would have been current around the time the puzzle was being designed fo

I love cryptography... and I love cryptography thanks to Edgar Allan. I was obsessed with The Gold Bug as a kid. That got me into cryptography, which eventually got me into programming. Now, get me Jupiter, we have work to do:)

The first three pieces of the puzzle were just very simple, basic, textbook hand-cyphers - two were Vigenère and one was a Transposition cipher - and it took them that long to do the first three - and the last one remains unsolved.

You'd think that with people from the CIA and NSA - they'd be able crack these things with their eyes closed.

It doesn't give me a lot of confidence that the government could crack anything strong than the ciphers encoded by a Capt'n Crunch decoder wheel...

Nothing sad about this. It just illustrates that cryptanalysis is very hard when there's not enough context.

Not only that, but there's little incentive to solve these cyphers. It's not like he's hiding a Swiss bank account or ICBM launch codes.The best a cracker could expect would be some kudos and maybe a job offer.Not something anyone is going to spend supercomputer time on or build a botnet to crack.

A large part of the problem is that the sculptor wasn't meticulous enough, and introduced _errors_ to the cyphertexts. That makes the decryption all the more complicated, because you have to brute-force all the possible errors he could have made and try each of them against your proposed solution. For a linear encryption scheme, you can find out where the errors are and cut down on the time, but for a matrix type encryption, even if you had the key and the cipher, you will get gibberish out with a single

not reading your links, because schneier is an asshole, but you are right. the fourth part was encrypted by an algorithm without backdoors. the man that help 'invent' the algorithm was well aware of backdoor how and whys. BTW any and all public encryption algorithms have back doors including schneier's. maybe he said that in those links?

I'm not familiar with Kryptos, and I'm not one for cryptography. We know there are (at least) two layers here, the encryption and the resulting riddle. Obviously Sanborn is being coy.

The word IQLUSION stood out to me. At face value this seems to be a misspelling of illusion, but also obvious is the beginning IQ: intelligence quotient. If that is abbreviated to intelligence, and you read through the rest, you get intelligence illusion. Perhaps a reference to counter-intelligence? This is Langley, after all.

Maybe this is old news, or nothing, or part of the second layer riddle. Just something I thought of after a few minutes. I didn't have any insight about UNDERGRUUND, though.

Nope. The greatest fool can ask a question that the wisest man cannot answer.

It's incredible easy to make a cipher so convulated and impractical (e.g. encode by the phase of the moon determined by the fourteenth character, then transpose all vowels, add up the number of strokes within each letter using the Arial font, multiply those numbers by the number 10 places ahead of it, then look those up on a ceasar cipher) that it's boring and uninteresting to decipher it and pretty much "impossible". Unfortunately, it also becomes incredibly useless as a cipher then because it becomes tedious to communicate using it, and the security of a cipher has nothing to do with its difficulty of encryption or decryption procedure - you'll probably find that a couple of supercomputers could find enough patterns in the above "cipher" that they could find the right answers without having to even KNOW the phase of the moon.

The thing about mathematical ciphers is that the method is public and yet they are still incredibly difficult to decrypt. This isn't an interesting cipher, mathematically speaking, because the method is closed so it could be anything. All we have is some jumbled text and (presumably) a sensible answer that we're not privy to. It's more a children's puzzle than a cipher, just a very difficult one - because nobody actually uses this cipher to communicate (so the cipher can be unnecessarily complicated without actually being *secure*, the plaintext could well be complete junk, the message may even be erroneously encoded, and there's only a single - non-militarily-important - instance of an encoded text).

In short - nobody cares. It's like the book-competitions where someone buries treasure and publishes a book which "gives the details" of where it's buried. It's pretty much chance if you find it or not because there is no requirement for the answer to be logical, practical or even decryptable. The one I saw, you had to draw a line from the eye of a character on each artwork-strewn page, through their index finger, to a particular letter in a word on the outside of the page border, then interpret those clues which narrowed things down to an entire field somewhere in the UK - the "winner" was the author's former-flatmate's girlfriend.

The importance of a ciphered message is more related to its origin, the probability of it being an unintentional leak, the probability of it being militarily important, and other non-mathematical factors. Then, if you have the impetus, running it through a supercomputer with what little you know or (infinitely better) getting a couple more messages that use the same scheme and are likely to reveal commonalities. That's how we beat Engima. This is just a puzzle-book, and quite boring because it can actually just be gibberish and nobody would really care.

This is the same reason Lost appealed to the masses, but not the thinking folk -- if you can throw arbitrary impossible bullshit in to "explain" something, it's not really an explanation. It became more like a bunch of kids playing Cops and Robbers with the one kid who decides he's got an alien spacecraft with a freeze ray that he can use at any point to immobilize his enemies. Call it a black swan if you want, but it certainly affects how interesting a story is.

This isn't an interesting cipher, mathematically speaking, because the method is closed so it could be anything. All we have is some jumbled text and (presumably) a sensible answer that we're not privy to. [...] This is just a puzzle-book, and quite boring because it can actually just be gibberish and nobody would really care.

Err... so how was it possible to decode the other three sections then? Obviously it's not gibberish, it's intelligible English text encoded using familiar algorithms. And people ha

Nobody was talking about the art of the sculpture. And in that respect, why on Earth would anyone really care if the code was "real" so long as it was representative? Also, the sculpture *did* have errors in its transcription - quite serious ones that the sculptor had to admit to - so it was probably never even double-checked as being a valid cipher (and therefore could easily be unsolvable due to a silly, simple transcription mistake). An

At least, that's what I'd guess from how excited you sound about it. Congratulations, kiddo! Hope it was good for both of you.

Just a thought though, but I'm not entirely sure Slashdot is the best venue for bragging about it. A good chunk of us are old enough to have found out what sex produces (i.e. children), another chunk of us are (contrary to stereotypes) actually female, and some more of us have no idea what this "fucking" is all about anyway. Perhaps your friends would be more appreciative? Assum

On the first point, might I suggest looking at the posting histories of Slashdot users such as Macgrrl [slashdot.org], AriaStar [slashdot.org], xirusmom [slashdot.org], and girlintraining [slashdot.org], among other possibilities [google.com] (though admittedly the username "girlintraining" might suggest someone not born to femininity; I'm honestly not sure).

On the second point, may I direct your attention to this most informative link [wikipedia.org], as requested.;)

Well, I did the only sensible thing and entered it into WolframAlpha [wolframalpha.com] for analysis. So, at this point, I have determined that "fucking" is a very colloquial, informal intensifier with a Scrabble score of 17 that corresponds to the telephone keypad digits, 382-5464. I give up.

I suppose you're right in that I shouldn't lecture people about what they ought to find funny. I was just frustrated that some people would interpret my comment as hate-speech rather than simply being a bad joke.

Ironically, at the time of this writing, my original comment has received just one "-1 Troll" mod, followed by three "+1 Funny" mods. I'm not quite sure what to make of that...*ugh* I really just want this thread to be over.